According to Schaller, the advent of Uber and Lyft has resulted in a 180 percent increase in traffic on streets in major cities across the country.

In other words, people aren't choosing Lyft or Uber over driving themselves, the report says. So there are more cars on the road, not less.

According to Schaller, people are actually choosing to take Lyft or Uber instead of the subway or the bus.

The report says that people would have taken public transit, or biked or walked, to their destination had Uber and Lyft not been available.

Separate from the report's findings, Uber, Lyft and other services have been blamed for drops in subway ridership we've seen in recent years and the resulting drop in badly needed revenue.

I don't know.

We had traffic on Staten Island long before there was a Lyft or an Uber. And the ride-hailing services aren't nearly as prevalent here as they are in other parts of the city. So how do we explain ever-worsening traffic out here? Few Islanders would argue that congestion isn't getting worse.

And traffic in the city overall has been bad for years. Ride-share cars aren't making things better, no, but are they really making things that much worse? As in, if we root them out or limit them somehow we'll see a real difference? Again, I don't know.

What role does overall city planning play in all this traffic congestion we see?

On Staten Island, for example, we have a local road system that's basically unchanged from colonial times. Highways built later weren't designed for the amount of traffic that they have to carry day after day. It's simple: Too many cars, not enough Staten Island Expressway.

Perfect example: The borough-paralyzing traffic we see here every time there's a serious accident on the Gowanus Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or some other distant road, bridge or tunnel. It's one big interlocking system that crashes under even the slightest stress.

So blaming Lyft and Uber only serves to absolve city, state and federal officials of their responsibility for our traffic and transit needs. And while cracking down on them will please the taxi industry lobby and various lawmakers and unions, is it going to demonstrably improve the quality of life for ordinary New Yorkers?

And while subway ridership may be down statistically, tell that to folks who are trying to jam themselves onto overcrowded trains every rush hour. Tell that to the people who have to stand for the entire length of their journeys. See how empty the trains seem to them.

New York City, like a lot of cities across the country, faces a fundamental problem: Great masses of people heading to the same destination at the same time in order to work. They're using the same road systems and the same transit systems during the same few hours, morning and night. A saturation point is being reached.

Until we have flying cars, we're going to have to figure out some way around it. More folks working off-hour shifts could help. So could telecommuting. Or how locating workplaces in areas aren't in already crowded metropolitan centers?